Down with the System: A Memoir (of Sorts)

by Serj Tankian

American president Woodrow Wilson aimed to give Armenians a piece of their historical homeland in the East. The land that is modern-day Turkey, including the Black Sea coast, was to be split into two nations: one for the Turks, one for the Armenians. The Turks, awash in a rising tide of aggrieved nationalism, felt insulted, and cited a right to self-determination for the people living on the land that was ceded for the new Republic of Armenia. A majority of the population, they argued, was Turkish. This was technically correct but only because the Turks had exterminated 1.5 million Armenians, ethnically cleansing this land—land my own relatives lived on—of its Armenian past. They believed in their right to codify their campaign of cultural erasure, enshrining it as international law. The Turks subsequently fought what they called their War of Independence, eventually forcing the abandonment of the Treaty of Sèvres, the end of the Wilsonian vision for a Republic of Armenia, and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey.